Time of Hope by C. P. Snow
Engish fiction
Source – Personal copy
I mentioned that I was reading a book by a writer who isn’t that well known these days. Lord Snow was well regarded in his day, with his main body of fiction being the eleven-book Stranger and Brothers series. This book was the third in the series to be published, but in the series’s later reading order, it is the first to read. The series was adapted into a BBC TV show in the early 1980s, and he was longlisted for the Booker. But he is a writer who is in that void between being forgotten and rediscovered. Part of me feels he may be rediscovered at some point, as his book Two Cultures grappled with the breakdown between Science and the humanities, and he had a foot in both camps as a writer and, by day, a chemist. This is my third book for this week’s 1949 club !
Aunt Milly even spared my mother any exhortation when she agreed to find my fees. She saved that for me an hour or two later. She was never worried about repeating herself, and so she gave me the same warning as on the afternoon of my father’s bankruptcy, three years before. I was not to expect success. It was likely that I should have a most undistinguished career at this new school.
‘You’ve got too good an opinion of yourself, said Aunt Milly firmly and enthusiastically, with her usual lack of facial expression. ‘I don’t blame you for it altogether. It’s your mother’s fault for letting you think you’re something out of the or-dinary. No wonder you’re getting too big for your boots’
Another great Aunt from the 1920s
This book is the first in the stranger and brother series where as the other book I had read from the series was abpout a group of people in a woirk place this book is about one man. Lewis Elliot; he is from the lower middle class. The book shows what happens when the fortune the mother feels they may be getting is suddenly wiped out by the father going bankrupt, and how they have to fall back into a more frugal lifestyle, and how this affects the young Lewis, but as he meets George Passant, a solicitor, he sets his sights on the law. He gets a windfall from the death of his Aunt Milly. I liked her after just reading Wodehouse; here was another aunt who liked to put her fingers in her family’s pies and had opinions. But she left the young man enough to get on in the law, and he aims to be a barrister; this takes him from his West Midlands home to London . Along the way, he meets a young woman, Sheila. Now she is a character that, in a way, seems more modern than the time it was written: a girl with mood swings, and one that is maybe is Lewis looks at more closely, is more trouble for him, but he can’t see that, and she helps him as he studies. This relationship is odd; she isn’t that in love with him, but he wants to settle down and marry her. This is the intro to Lewis, and he appears in the rest of the series.
Autumn came, and I was restless, full of ex-pectation. The School reopened. In the bright September nights I walked down the Newarke to George Passant’s classes, full of a kind of new-year elation and resolve. Going back to my lodgings under the misty autumn moon, I wondered about the group that Passant was collecting round him. They were all students at the School, some of whom I knew by name; young women who attended an occasional class, one or two youths who were studying full-time for an external London degree. They gathered round him at the end of the evening, and moved noisily back into the town.
The toehr main figure in the book series George Passant AND lei=wis paths cross in this book!
This and the second book in the series set up the two main characters: Lewis Elliot and George Passant. What follows is their post-studies life. The book ends with Lewis getting married and starting his career. But already, choosing the moody, unstable Shelia is holding him back. We also learn a bit about George, the main character in the second book in the series; the rest of the book follows them through their careers. The book was the third, but many readers see it as the first to read in the series, as it fills in Lewis’s childhood and coming-of-age. It shows how hope and work can change things. The book offers a realistic look at one man’s path to the bar and marriage; later books show how this has a knock-on effect. Have you heard of C. P. Snow or this series? This series deserves rediscovery, as it captures the period from post-World War I through World War II and into the 1950s through a group of people in the upper echelons of English politics and business.
